Time Out: Talk of the Town

Talk Of The Town

Porteños are as hooked on celebrity culture as anyone else – and Argentina’s got talent, Martin Gambarotta, political editor of the Buenos Aires Herald draws up the city’s A-List.

Fragment:
When Argentina’s economy collapsed in late 2001, all that there appeared to be left were people banging pots on the streets, long queues outside the banks – and trashy art galleries. Daniela Luna’s art gallery Appetite, which first opened in San Telmo in 2005, has the feel of that traumatic crisis. But Luna, a punk style starlet and business school dropout, is herself a walking art statement, and seems to thrive on the hype she creates. Her bold moves are amply covered by the mainstream press, and include the opening of an outpost of Appetite in Brooklyn, New York, and the stablishing of party night War Club in the off-the-beaten-track barrio of Boedo in 2008. She looked to be hitting the big time when Appetite’s troupe of emerging artists became the first argentinians ever to be invited to the annual Frieze art fair in London. The international press loved the idea of the gallery’s attention-grabbing artwork made out of the rubbish and leftovers of what was consumed at the fair.